Truus Bronkhorst
by Eva van Schaik

from: Dancing Dutch, contemporary dance in the netherlands
(2000, Theater Instituut Nederland, Amsterdam)

‘Performance is happiness’, says Truus Bronkhorst (1951). Since her final project at the department of contemporary and modern dance at Amsterdam’s Theaterschool, in 1977, she has sought for her happiness and also her anger, love and fear on the stage. Without the warmth of spotlights she would rather not live. Because: ‘I am a dancer by origin and passion. From the moment I was born, it was certain that I would become a dancer. That is my task. I have never found it necessary to ask myself why that is. I dance.’

In the quarter of a century since she completed her dance training, she has sometimes litterally collapsed with powerless feet and arms raised, pleading for mercy. Repeatedly, she has pulled on a boxing glove to take a swing at the dance world and iets mechanisms of compulsion, as though she was a kick boxer. She wrote: ‘I learned that in dance, it is all about life and for that you need technique, but not the other way round.’

In the presence of her audience she demands her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that demanding attitude turned her into a soloist, uncompromising towards herself and others. Her many solo productions between 1980 and 1986, as well as her later ensemble choreographies, showed how much militancy, tenacity and above all unconditional belief in the mysteries of dance and theatre that required. When, for example, in 1989, she received the Golden Theatre-dance Prize, she was compelled to hobble onto the victory platform on two crutches. And later a broken bone in her foot could not prevent her from performing.

Bronkhorst only actually stops when it really is no longer possible to go on. The clenched fist with which she invariably thanks her audience is illustrative of her rebellious posture. Although white by birth, in the theatre she feels herself to be like a Black Panther at the time of the Olympic games. Truus Bronkhorst belongs to the second baby-boom generation: she grew up within the spirit of the reconstruction in the Catholic south, was formed at secondary school in the grip of her imagination and by call of pop music. After the 1960’s and 1970’s , she didn’t want to make a genuflection towards the commercialisation of the 1980’s. She called one of her productions Dutch (Export Quality), not without some irony concerning the export value of Dutch theatre-dance.

Truus Bronkhorst is unique primarily because she always grants space to the mystery of human compassion in her militant attitude. Through an unprecedented hybrid of dance and  mime, she developed her own signature: dance remained her discipline, but she opened it up to influences from mime and the multi-disciplinary fring theatre of the late 1970’s. She was actually averse to American abstract-modern dance, as was propagated at the end of the 1970’s by her colleagues at the Stichting Dansproduktie. However, it was precisely this open-hearted dissident posture that forced her into an implicit critical commentary of its tyranny. The best art criticism after all is the artwork itself. Thus she created surprising hybrids, for example combining contemporary minimalism and the asceticism of the middele ages. Little by little, she developed an assembled model, within which she fragmented her performances into separate dance scenes. Also, in the timing lay her authenticity. For close observers of her spirit of resistance, that sequence of scenes had the power of a boa constrictor.

She skipped like a court jester, with tinkling bells around her ankles, stumbled about braying like a mule in white-feathered knickers, stuck her nose jauntily in the air like a Degas dancer, gouged a wound on her ribs with lipstick before letting herself be nailed to an imaginary cross, copulated with a bazooka with a humping pelvis or rammed an electric guitar à la Jimi Hendrix. But, she also portrayed herself as a geisha  with peacock’s feathers behind her buttocks, waved the national flag, beat on a little tin drum with her drumsticks in imitation of Oscar from Der Blechtrommel, or frolicked like a satyr in goat’s skin. And then, she paraded herself as a heroin whore with platinum blond wig, crowned herself with a gold paper crown as empress, wandered about in a black negligee in her own nightmare, appeared as a sphinx at a masked ball, marched with black clothes pegs on her fingers in the fascist goose-step, knelt down by a miniature coffin pulling it to herself with a harrowing gesture and then pushing it away again. What remained throughout all of those metamorphoses was the appalling look, slicing through marrow and bone.

With a grim poker face. In one stroke she could change from a vindictive Medea to a fatally wounded Pavlova swan. To undertake these transformations, while preserving her own passion, this dancer was prepared to discipline herself, withdrawn like a mystical hermit into het Amsterdam studio, to think about her steps and personages. She would rather endure her passion as a declared outlaw, than conform to the preferences of her colleagues or to fashion trends. With that mentality she also conquered injuries and pepped herself up year after year for one-woman shows. In 1986, she had come so far that she founded the Stichting van de Toekomst / Foundation of the Future (in collaboration with her partner-dramaturge Marien Jongewaard). From that moment, she based her productions not only on her own experiences as a performing dancer, but also sought out the power of teamwork, with kindred spirits from among the new dance generation. Firstly however, she tested her managerial qualities on her old instructor Max Dooyes, and thereafter, on three black disco dancers from East Amsterdam. She did this firstly because of the age discrimination in the prescriptive dance aesthetic, and secondly because of the divide in the social esteem for black and white dance art.

More than twelve years later – becoming in the meantime mother of a daughter and artistic director-choreographer of a dance group – she realised that she couldn’t do without theatre-dance. Thus, she turned back to theatre after the creation of her tetrych (Wonderful World -  Goodbye Body – Truus Bronkhorst, Marien Jongewaard and friends and The Fall), once again armed with an electric guitar and boxing glove. The national dance press did not unconditionally accept the spirit of dance, which leaves its traces behind on the female body via wrinkles and other marks of time. Theatre dancers around the age of fifty should not, as far as she is concerned, have to be segregated into their own senior group. That form of discrimination is a typical western response when confronted with decline and transience. For the first time, she evoked eastern dance mysticism to rebuke western machismo and politically correct thinking. At the modern ball of dance globalisation, anno 2000, she manifests herself as a black swan, to inspire all of the young princes and their ladies-in-waiting at her house party to dance ecstasy. That too is Truus Bronkhorst, the militant mystic who cannot live without theatre-dance.

She does not, therefore, stop hammering away at pitiless compassion, unconditional surrender and above all: harmony, humour and humanity. Like her, her younger colleagues on the stage must be prepared to give themselves up as lust objects, hotshots, braggarts, whores, heroines and saints of past and present. It is precisely that universal expressive power of icongraphic symbols and clichés from art history that this woman considers to be her most important waepon and shield. This transforms her young empolyees and team members into freshmen, who have to be initiated into the Walhalla of dance. As wanton hooligans, they have to experience the holiness of ballet and dance and allow it to be experienced. They embody, and overcome, social-psychological mechanisms of compulsion, situating themselves on the cutting edge. What is a stage if not the no man’s land between life and death?

The spirit of dance, however heavily beset, offers beauty and consolation. The big guns of the musical inheritance are therefore not shunned. Within an hour Brubeck and Bach, Mahler and Madonna, Schubert, Stravinsky and The Stones can serve as machine gunners. What is valid for the musical foundation is also valid for the choreographic composition. The dominating presence is a world, which is inhumane, terrifyingly destructive and aggressive. Again and again Bronkhorst, Jongewaard and their friends spring upon the irritation that they stir up with their mirroring of reality. With the self-same scene they know how to deeply hurt one person, whilst bringing another to a state of euphoria.

Throughout all of the different visages that this woman has portrayed on stage, she has always remained true to the one.”

[ terug ]